Dell Storage Forum —ZLTO
is an association that handles national relations for over 18,000
farmers across the Netherlands. With data
volumes on the rise, the association was having difficulty meeting its
recovery point objective (RPO) over the existing network
infrastructure. ZLTO deployed Silver
Peak software with a Dell
EqualLogic storage solution to accelerate its offsite replication
workloads cost-effectively and meet its five-minute RPO without
upgrading the wide area network (WAN) infrastructure.

ZLTO has two Dell
EqualLogic storage groups that are used as data stores for the
company’s VMware virtualized environment. The association runs all local
servers and applications from these SAN groups, with each location
serving as a failover site for the other in the case of an unexpected
outage. ZLTO had been allocating 20 megabits-per-second (Mbps) of a 50
Mbps wide area network (WAN) for storage replication, which involves
starting a new auto-replication process every five minutes for six
different volumes in production. However, WAN bandwidth, distance and
network quality challenges were continually slowing the replication
processes.

“Even though the distance between our data center and disaster recovery
site is not terribly long, we were still having difficulty replicating
between the two locations,” said Bart Haans, ICT manager for ZLTO. “The
WAN link between our two locations did not provide enough capacity to
support rapid synchronization of all our volumes.”

Silver Peak Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) software works
in concert with Dell EqualLogic to overcome common network challenges
that hamper offsite replication. The Silver Peak virtual solutions are
known for high-scalability and performance, and run on every major
hypervisor—simplifying data center and offsite deployments. The result
is 20x faster offsite replication on-average over the WAN.

“We were able to install the solution simply by redirecting the traffic
between the EqualLogic arrays through the Silver Peak virtual
appliance,” said Haans. “No changes to the network were required, and we
were up-and-running accelerating traffic in just a few hours.”

With Silver Peak, ZLTO reduced the amount of bandwidth required for
replication by 86%. In addition, ZLTO is now able to move almost 11
Terabytes (TB) of traffic over the existing WAN in a 24-hour period,
helping the association replicate all six of their production volumes in
the desired five-minute intervals.

Note: Silver Peak Systems, the Silver Peak logo, and Silver Peak VXOA
are all trademarks of Silver Peak Systems, Inc. All other trademarks and
registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.